Preference screen display text block

I had the same problem, and needed to show a static text block. Though in my case it was in lined into the preference page.

The tag does allow for linking though that doesn't solve the need for static text. However, the Preference tag itself does. You can have it show text, the usual title line, as well as the text summary underneath, both are optional, and then make it un-selectable. It'll give the illusion of a static text.

<Preference
    android:key="pref_static_field_key"
    android:selectable="false"
    android:title="you can omit the title"
    android:summary="Multi line description\ncan go here."/>

A.Grandt's solution gives really nice imitation of text block within Preference Activity, but I would add an android:persistent="false" attribute, which avoids storing unnecessarily this 'pseudo preference' into SharedPreferences file for your app's settings.

To sum up. Imitation of TextView within Preferences Activity as A.Grandt suggested would be:

<Preference
    android:key="pref_static_field_key"
    android:selectable="false"
    android:persistent="false"
    android:title="you can omit the title"
    android:summary="Multi line description\ncan go here."/>

Although you can use \n for line breaking, yet it won't resize the Preference Item itself, so there is a possibility that these multilines will not be fully visible within a still single-line Preference Item.